I'm sure that's what MySpace said about the young whipper-snapper Facebook at one time. I'm sure you are correct the market won't go to Google, probably someone not even on radar yet. Look at emergence of SnapChat out of nowhere.

But 80% does seem kind of high by 2017. The younger kids may be that fickle but Facebook has penetrated pretty well into the Boomer generation. I don't see my wife and her friends of that age jumping around that much.

SnapChat isn't a replacement, it's a suppliment. Just like Instagram (though Facebook owns them now).

It will be interesting to see if some new challenger shows up with an actual viable replacement, but I'm not sure how you can set a date and a number with absolutely no one currently showing the potential to steal FB users.

Agreed. But author accomplished purpose of getting people like me and you to read it. :-)

I just mentioned SnapChat as example of how quickly things emerge today, you are absolutely correct it is not same service as Facebook. But that could change also, you never know.

The interesting thing in article was the conclusion it matches models typically used for predicting disease spread. I don't have the statistical chops to comment on that one. But that drove their prediction of 2017 and 80%.

I agree, there's nothing really comparable to Facebook that people could jump to. I don't see Google+ being a factor. Perhaps having a Facebook-type social media profile will fall out of fashion and people will delete FB accounts with no replacement. After all, we have Instagram; we have LinkedIn; we have SnapChat; we have text messaging. Maybe phone calls will make a comeback. I basically use Facebook as a news feed now. As this story indicates, its relevance as a way to connect with people is fading.

Got to agree. Facebook at this point is a web institution, like Google itself and Youtube. You only need to look at the fallout with Youtube recently to see that even with a big screw up that everyone hates, viewers and video makers alike, it doesn't matter, these sites are too big to fail.

Facebook has more than a billion users. That's an incredible number that no other websites or apps come close to. It's really, really difficult to imagine that in three short years, more than 800 million users across the globe will abandon the site.

Princeton's application rate must be down relative to Harvard and Yale and it needed some Google juice. It's basic math that if (and I'm pulling these numbers from the air) 60% of the global population has the capability to open a Facebook account and 40% have done so, that growth rate cannot possibly continue at the same pace.

This is quite fascinating to compare the spread of ideas to the spread of infectious diseases.

Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infIdeas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models. ectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models.

What is the medicine to kill bad, or stupid ideas that spread quickly? Hmm What about vaccines?

@ Susan Fourtane, may be that stupid and bad ideas die away naturally as they spread more and more? It actually happens this way. As more and more people are touched by stupid ideas, stupidity of those ideas become more and more exposed and eventually they die away. But I tend to agree that ideas are like infectious diseases and spread really quickly.

I would only reverberate the general opinion of most of the people here. First logic is a very pertinent one that is to what Facebook is going to use its users. Without any website matching Facebook, it is a rather far-fetched idea that Facebook will lose currency in such short time. Starting today, if some website as promising as Facebook springs up, it will still take much longer time than three years to discount Facebook.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.